The geography of insurgent organization and its consequences for civil wars: Evidence from Liberia and Sierra Leone

Security Studies

Volumn 17, Issue 1, 2008, Pages 107-137

  Johnston, Patrick ^a  

^a NONE

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EID: 40849100571     PISSN: 09636412     EISSN: 15561852     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1080/09636410801894191     Document Type: Article

References (145)

1. Robert D. Kaplan, The Coming Anarchy: Shattering the Dreams of the Post-Cold War (New York: Vintage, 2001).
2. William Reno, Corruption and State Politics in Sierra Leone (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1995)
3. and Reno, Warlord Politics and African States (Boulder, CO: Lynne Rienner,1998).
4. Jeffrey Herbst, States and Power in Africa (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2000).
5. Reno, Warlord Politics and African States
6. Herbst, States and Power in Africa;
7. Robert I. Rotberg, ed. State Failure and Weakness in a Time of Terror (Cambridge, MA: World Peace Foundation, 2003)
8. and Zartman, I. William, Collapsed States: The Disintegration and Restoration of Legitimate Authority (Boulder, CO: Lynne Rienner, 1995).
9. See, for example, Charles Tilly, "War-Making and State-Making as Organized Crime," in Bringing the State Back In, eds., Peter Evans, Dietrich Rueschemeyer, and Theda Skocpol (New York: Cambridge University Press), 169-91
10. Tilly, Coercion, Capital and European States, A.D. 990-1992 (New York: Blackwell);
11. Brian Downing, The Military Revolution and Political Change: Origins of Democracy and Autocracy Early Modern Europe (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1992)
12. and Thomas Ertman, Birth of the Leviathan: Building States and Regimes in Medieval and Early Modern Europe (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1997)
13. For a similar contribution on modern state-building, see Diane E. Davis and Anthony W. Peireira, ed., Irregular Armed Forces and Their Role in Politics and State Formation (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2003).
14. See especially Mary Kaldor, New and Old Wars: Organized Violence in a Global Era (Palo Alto, CA: Stanford University Press, 1999). She argues that globalization processes generate "horizontally-organized" armed groups whose behavior "blurs the distinction between war, organized crime, and large-scale violations of human rights."
15. Kaldor, New and Old Wars, 2. In practice, the scholarly distinction between hierarchical and networked rebel organizations has not provided many insights into how organizational structures affect outcomes because of scholars' frequent under-specification of these concepts' attributes and mistreatment of the concepts' indicators. Scholars have often referred to rebel organizations with visible leadership as "hierarchies" and organizations with less-visible leadership as "networked" or "decentralized." The uncritical conceptual treatment of rebel organization has done little more than to describe observed outcomes post-hoc rather than to build theory deductively about the effects of variations in organizational relationships between rebel leadership and subordinates. Similar problems have plagued analysis of terrorist organizations. Grahame Thompson laments that the loose usage of the term "network" to describe terrorist organization has rendered "network" merely a word, rather than a concept.
16. See Thompson, Between Hierarchies and Markets (New York: Oxford University Press, 2003), 2.
17. Even rebel organizations to which analysts commonly refer as "networks" contain these aspects of hierarchy. In my ideal-typical concepts, M-form hierarchical organization more closely approximates networked organization than U-form organizations do, but these features of intentionally organized, topdown organizational leadership distinguish it from networks, in which control is organized horizontally among members of more-or-less equal status. Hierarchies do sometimes emerge within networks, but network theorists argue that these authority relationships tend to emerge from interactions within the network and result in clusters of authoritative people according to the importance of their function within the network.
18. See Thompson, Between Hierarchies and Markets, 59-61.
19. I make no claim that this same logic applies to terrorist organizations, whose transnational ties tend to be more extensive than those of insurgent organizations and whose sporadic attacks do not require as immediate central coordination as do most insurgent operations. Terrorist organizations are more likely to, but will not necessarily, take on networked organizational forms.
20. See also Sun-Ki Chai, "An Organizational Economics Approach to Anti-Government Violence," Comparative Politics 26, no. 1 (October 1993): 99-110.
21. Paul Collier and Anke Hoeffler, "On Economic Causes of Civil War," Oxford Economic Papers 50, no. 4 (1998): 563-73
22. and Collier and Hoeffler, "Greed and Grievance in Civil Wars," Oxford Economic Papers 56, no. 4 (2004): 563-95.
23. Sierra Leone Truth and Reconciliation Commission, "Witness to the Truth: Report of the Sierra Leone Truth & Reconciliation Commission," vol. 2, chap. 2, 76-83. The Report of the Sierra Leone Truth and Reconciliation Commission shows that Kamajor militias lacked oversight toward the end of the war.
24. A notable exception is Chai, "An Organizational Economics Approach to Anti-Government Violence." Chai presents an application of the new economics of organization to nonstate armed actors.
25. For an exception, see Jeremy M. Weinstein, Inside Rebellion (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2006).
26. The literature on terrorism and anti-government violence has generated some hypotheses on how organization and organizational processes affect terrorist behavior. Martha Crenshaw has used an organizational logic similar to that developed in this article to demonstrate how leaders of terrorist organizations, whose personal ambitions are tied to the success of the organization, attempt to promote organizational effectiveness through supplying incentives for subordinates to pursue organizational rather than personal goals
27. See Martha Crenshaw, "Theories of Terrorism: Instrumental and Organizational Approaches," in Inside Terrorist Organizations, ed. David C. Rapoport (New York: Columbia University Press, 1988)
28. and Chai, "An Organizational Economics Approach to Anti-Government Violence."
29. The neoclassical approach struggles to explain variation in group structures, why hierarchies form in the first place, and how they are maintained. For an example, see Collier and Hoeffler, "On Economic Causes of Civil War."
30. For example, see Barry R. Posen, "The Security Dilemma and Ethnic Conflict," Survival 35, no. 1 (Spring 1993): 27-47
31. Jack Snyder and Robert Jervis, "Civil War and the Security Dilemma," in Civil Wars, Insecurity, and Intervention, eds., Barbara F. Walter and Jack Snyder (New York: Columbia University Press, 1999)
32. Barbara F. Walter, "The Critical Barrier to Civil War Settlement," International Organization 51, no. 3 (Summer 1997): 335-64
33. and Barbara F. Walter, Committing to Peace: The Successful Settlement of Civil Wars (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2002)
34. For nonunitary actor approaches to ethnic conflict that focus on elites, see V. P. Gagnon, "Ethnic Nationalism and International Conflict: The Case of Serbia," International Security 19, no. 3 (Winter 1994/1995): 130-66
35. and Jack Snyder, From Voting to Violence: Democratization and Nationalist Conflict (New York: W.W. Norton, 2000)
36. For a focus on opportunism from below, see John Mueller, "The Banality of "Ethnic War,"' International Security 25, no. 1 (Summer 2000): 42-70.
37. I do, however, include insurgents' testimony to demonstrate the plausibility to my inferences.
38. This methodological approach resembles Chai, "An Organizational Economics Approach to Anti- Government Violence," 101.
39. The civil war literature pays surprisingly little attention to military effectiveness. No corresponding literature systematically explains whether particular types of groups fight more effectively than others in similar contexts.
40. Herbst, States and Power in Africa.
41. "Managerial resources" refers to technology that increases cooperation between principals and agents. I emphasize monitoring technology that enables principals to detect when agents are shirking their orders. Another resource, of course, could be an organizational culture or charismatic leadership that fosters cooperation
42. See Gary J. Miller, Managerial Dilemmas: The Political Economy of Hierarchy (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1992). Although I acknowledge that endogenous norms and culture can be potent tools for alignment of principal and agent interests, I pay less attention to these factors to examine other exogenous variables that contribute to the formation of effective hierarchies in hard cases where norms or organizational culture do not align principal and agent interests.
43. For more on the U- and M-forms, see Alfred D. Chandler, Strategy and Structure: Chapters in the History of the American Industrial Enterprise (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1969)
44. see also Oliver E. Williamson, Markets and Hierarchies: Analysis and Antitrust Implications (New York: Free Press, 1975).
45. See Alexander Cooley, Logics of Hierarchy: Problems of Organization in Empires, States and Military Occupations (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2005). Cooley's book introduces this logic as a predictor of institutional outcomes and governance patterns in a number of different contexts, including empires, states, and military occupations.
46. Oliver E. Williamson, The Economic Institutions of Capitalism (New York: The Free Press, 1985).
47. Cooley, The Logics of Hierarchy, 48-49.
48. Williamson, Markets and Hierarchies.
49. To be sure, most armed groups also perform economic, security, and even some administrative functions. I focus on violence as the main asset produced by armed groups because the capacity to produce violence is a requisite for armed groups to perform these functions.
50. Cooley, Logics of Hierarchy, 56-63.
51. On monitoring and punishment in principal-agent relationships, see Matthew D. McCubbins, Roger G. Noll, and Barry R. Weingast, "Administrative Procedures as Instruments of Political Control," Journal of Law, Economics, and Organization 3, no. 2 (Fall 1987): 243-77.
52. M-form organization could be governed effectively if leadership enjoys sufficient monitoring and disciplinary capability. However, as the cases below illustrate, these assets are scarce.
53. One could argue that neither geographic expansion nor managerial technology is exogenous, that is, groups can and do make choices about how much territory to control (and when to expand or contract) and what investments to make in equipment. Yet I contend that these variables are exogenous given that rebel groups must expand to seize national political power and that the quantity and especially the quality of available technology at given periods in time is exogenous. For example, the cellular technology was much more advanced in the early twenty-first century during the LURD and Kamajor insurgencies than at the onset of the NPFL and RUF rebellions in the early 1990s. Thus, the choices groups could make concerning technology investments were heavily constrained by exogenous factors.
54. Although beyond the scope of this paper, the argument implies that such compromises have broader applicability to the study of the making, disintegration, and remaking of political authority and control across time and space. Charles Tilly, for example, highlights the exigencies of devolution in early modern European state-building projects, in which diffusions of coercive capability and capital often necessitated indirect, M-form type governance
55. See Tilly, Coercion, Capital and European States AD 990-1992, 24.
56. There are of course ways to mitigate principal-agent problems. First, elites could pay subordinates more than the subordinates could acquire by looting. If elites would discover that subordinates were cheating on this arrangement, then the elites could discontinue salary payment to the subordinates. Second, regional commanders could be rotated. Yet rotation incurs costs. Rotated commanders have less local knowledge than permanent ones, which hinders the quality of decision making. Another way of mitigating agency problems is to foster a type of Weberian "elective affinity" between the principal's interests and agents' ideas about those interests. Elective affinity fosters high levels of compliance and morale through the routinization of norms and institutionalized procedures. It can even bring agents' preferences into alignment with the principal's. As this article demonstrates, however, organizing such routines is a central challenge to organizational leadership
57. See H. H. Gerth and C. Wright Mills, ed. From Max Weber: Essays in Sociology (New York: Oxford University Press, 1946), 62-63.
58. Risa A. Brooks, "The Impact of Culture, Society, Institutions, and International Forces on Military Effectiveness," in Creating Military Power: The Sources of Military Effectiveness, eds., Risa A. Brooks and Elizabeth Stanley-Mitchell (Palo Alto, CA: Stanford University Press, 2007), 7.
59. One example is John Mearsheimer, The Tragedy of Great Power Politics (New York: W. W. Norton, 2001), 55-82.
60. Stephen Biddle, Military Power: Explaining Victory and Defeat in Modern Battle (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2004), 21. Biddle, using five different indices, likewise finds that material factors can at best explain less than two-thirds of observed outcomes.
61. See James D. Fearon and David D. Laitin, "Explaining Interethnic Cooperation," American Political Science Review 90, no. 4 (December 1996): 715-35
62. and Robert Axelrod, The Evolution of Cooperation (New York: Basic Books, 1984).
63. Fearon and Laitin, "Explaing Interethnic Cooperation," 1996.
64. Fearon and Laitin also find that ethnic fractionalization is not a significant explanatory variable for the onset of civil war. See Fearon and Laitin, "Ethnicity, Insurgency, and Civil War," American Political Science Review 97, no. 1 (February 2003): 75-90.
65. Weinstein, Inside Rebellion
66. see also Macartan Humphreys and Jeremy M. Weinstein, "Handling and Manhandling Civilians in Civil War," American Political Science Review 100, no. 3 (August 2006): 429-47.
67. International Crisis Group, "Liberia: Unravelling," Africa Briefing No. 10 (July 2002), 4-5.
68. Nicholas Sambanis, "Using Case Studies to Expand Economic Models of Civil War," Perspectives on Politics 2, no. 2 (June 2004): 259-79.
69. See Richard Snyder, "Scaling Down: The Subnational Comparative Method," Studies in Comparative International Development 36, no. 1 (Spring 2001): 93-110
70. and Gary King, Robert O. Keohane, and Sidney Verba, Designing Social Inquiry (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1994), 23-30, 217-18.
71. On diachronic within-case analysis, see King, Keohane, and Verba, Designing Social Inquiry, 219-23
72. Dietrich Rueschemeyer, "Can One or a Few Cases Yield Theoretical Gains?" in Comparative Historical Analysis in the Social Sciences eds., James Mahoney and Dietrich Rueschemeyer (New York: Cambridge University Press 2003), 305-36.
73. Alexander L. George and Andrew Bennett, Case Studies and Theory Development in the Social Sciences (Cambridge, MA.: MIT Press).
74. William Reno, "Order and Commerce in Turbulent Areas: 19th Century Lessons, 21st Century Practice," Third World Quarterly 25, no. 4 (2004): 607-25.
75. This should reveal insurgent leaders' real preferences, to the extent that these leaders actually have incentives to claim that they hold no aggressive ambitions to seize national power, but rather only to defend their communities from government atrocities.
76. Although the Kamajors were born as a civil defense force, the Sierra Leone Truth and Reconciliation Report shows that Kamajor leadership was indeed heavily involved in plans to invade the capital city in August 1997 to remove the Armed Forces Revolutionary Council military junta after it ousted President Ahmad Tejan Kabbah's regime in a coup. Although the plan was ostensibly to reinstate the exiled civilian government, the Truth and Reconciliation Commission Report reveals that many, including Kabbah himself, believed that Hinga Norman and his Kamajor militia sought to control Freetown for themselves.
77. See Sierra Leone Truth and Reconciliation Commission, "Witness to the Truth," vol. 3A, chap. 3, 248-74
78. Author interviews with Liberian refugees who lived in NPFL-controlled territory before fleeing, 23, 25, 27 June, Accra, Ghana.
79. Patrick Johnston, "Timber Booms, State Busts: The Political Economy of Liberian Timber," Review of African Political Economy 101 (2004): 441-56. Taylor also signed lucrative contracts with foreign firms to extract and export iron-ore
80. On this, see William Reno, "War, Markets, and the Reconfiguration of West Africa's Weak States," Comparative Politics 29, no. 4 (July 1997): 493-510.
81. Precise information about the extent to which this occurred does not exist. I thus rely on the ethnographic record, conversations with other fieldworkers (academics and NGO personnel), and my own conversations with Liberians. It should also be noted that if Taylor had chosen to share the spoils of illicit resource trade with subordinates, the lack of direct oversight and opportunities for private gain would still have existed and likely hindered the NPFL's military effectiveness. Thus, Taylor's practice of nonpayment is not necessarily an irrational choice.
82. William Reno, "Foreign Firms and the Financing of Charles Taylor's NPFL," Liberian Studies Journal 18, no. 2 (1993): 175-88.
83. Reno, Warlord Politics and African States, 99.
84. Mark Huband, The Liberian Civil War (London: Frank Cass, 1998), 84-85, 111-12.
85. For a detailed account of Taylor's dealings with Johnson, see Stephen Ellis, The Mask of Anarchy: The Destruction of Liberia and the Religious Dimension of an African Civil War (New York: New York University Press, 2001), 80-81.
86. As corollary 2 proposed, leadership must be capable of credibly threatening subordinates with punishment to deter agent defection.
87. Author interview with Liberian refugees, Accra, Ghana, 23 June 2004.
88. Author interviews with Liberian lawyers and academics, Monrovia, Liberia, 25 July 2004, 27 July
89. International Crisis Group, "Liberia: Unravelling," Africa Briefing No. 10. (July 2002), 9.
90. The common values of these possible independent variables render them acceptable negative cases. On selecting negative cases, see James Mahoney and Gary Goertz, "The Possibility Principle: Choosing Negative Cases in Qualitative Research," American Political Science Review 98 no. 4 (November 2004): 653-69.
91. James Brabazon, "Liberia: Liberians United for Reconciliation and Democracy," The Royal Institute International Affairs, Africa Programme, Armed Non-State Actors Program Briefing Paper No. 1 (2003),2
92. Fearon and Laitin, "Explaining Interethnic Cooperation."
93. Brabazon, "Liberians United for Reconciliation and Democracy," 3
94. see also, William Reno, "The LURDs of the New Church," in African Guerrillas: Raging Against the Machine, eds., Morten Bas and Kevin C. Dunn (Boulder, CO: Lynn Rienner, 2007), 69-79.
95. International Crisis Group, "Tackling Liberia: The Eye of the Regional Storm," Africa Report No. 62 (April 2003), 3-4.
96. Contra hypothesis HA3, this inflow of aid did not create opportunism among the LURD ranks or undermine its effectiveness.
97. International Crisis Group, "Liberia: Unravelling," 4-5.
98. Ibid.
99. International Crisis Group, "Tackling Liberia: The Eye of the Regional Storm," 3-6.
100. Brabazon, "Liberians United for Reconciliation and Democracy," 6-7
101. and Stephen Ellis, "Liberia's Warlord Insurgency," in African Guerrillas, ed. Christopher Clapham (New York: James Currey, 1998), 159.
102. Brabazon, "Liberian United for Reconciliation and Democracy,"9.
103. On punishment and the governance of hierarchy, see Steven L. Solnick, "The Breakdown of Hierarchies in the Soviet Union and China: A Neoinstitutional Perspective," World Politics 48, no. 2 (January 1996): 209-38.
104. On factions with varying preferences and peace settlements, see Andrew Kydd and Barbara F. Walter, "Sabotaging the Peace: The Politics of Extremist Violence," International Organization 56, no. 2 (Spring 2002): 263-96.
105. Stephen Ellis, The Mask of Anarchy
106. and Sierra Leone Truth and Reconciliation Commission, "Witness to the Truth," vol. 2, chap. 3.
107. Paul Richards, Fighting for the Rainforest: War, Youth, and Resources in Sierra Leone (New York: James Currey, 1996), 5.
108. On asset-specificity and governance, see Williamson, Markets and Hierarchies
109. and Williamson, The Economic Institutions of Capitalism.
110. Douglas Farah, Blood from Stones: The Secret Financial Network of Terror (New York: Broadway, 2004).
111. See the map in Richards, Fighting for the Rainforest, 39.
112. The RUF recruited volunteer child soldiers and also kidnapped children to become fighters. For more on child soldiers, see Richards, Fighting for the Rainforest, 28-29
113. William P. Murphy, "Ingratitude and Patrimonial Punishment: Civilian Limb Amputations in the Sierra Leone Civil War," unpublished typescript, Northwestern University, Evanston, IL, 2004.
114. Not all parties believe IA's distribution of radios and close contact with the RUF was for altruistic purposes. Some suspected that IA profited from RUF smuggling and arms transfers. They believe that distribution of radio sets was to help coordinate arms transfers from Liberia. See alone Times, 22 October 2001.
115. Reno, Warlord Politics and African States, 124-25
116. and David Keen, Conflict and Collusion in Sierra Leone (New York: James Currey, 2005).
117. Collaboration between elements of the Sierra Leone Army (SLA) and the RUF also put civilians in a difficult spot because they no longer knew which side they could trust to provide security. For more on the dilemmas posed by sporadic SLA-RUF collaboration, see David Keen's description of the "sell-game." Keen, Conflict and Collusion in Sierra Leone, chap. 7.
118. United Nations, "Panel of Experts Report Pursuant to Resolution 1306," (December 2000), 17.
119. Ibid.
120. Ibid., 80.
121. On counterfactual thought experiments, see Phillip E. Tetlock, Phillip E. and Aaron Belkin, eds., Counterfactual Thought Experiments in World Politics: Logical, Methodological, and Psychological Perspectives (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1991)
122. and James D. Fearon, "Counterfactuals and Hypothesis Testing in Political Science," World Politics 43, no. 2 (January 1991): 169-95.
123. Agence France Press Interview with anonymous RUF regional commander. Agence France Press, December 1999.
124. United Nations, "Panel of Experts Report Pursuant to Resolution 1306," 16-17.
125. See Al J. Venter, War Dog (Havertown, PA: Casemate Publishing, 2006).
126. Author interview with a Kamajor subcommander, Panguma, Sierra Leone, 10 July 2004
127. Patrick Muana, "The Kamajoi Militia: Civil War, Internal Displacement, and the Politics of Counter-Insurgency," Africa Development 22, no. 3 and 4 (1997): 87-88
128. also, The Independent (London), 26 June 1997, 14.
129. Mariane C. Ferme and Danny Hoffman, "Hunter Militias and the International Human Rights Discourse in Sierra Leone and Beyond," Africa Today 50, no. 4 (Summer 2004): 73-74, 83-84. The Kamajors did not exercise perfect restraint from human rights violations, but they committed some ten times fewer than did the RUF. See volume 4 of the Report of the SLTRC for statistics on Kamajor human rights violations.
130. The Independent (London), 26 June 1997, 14
131. On Executive Outcomes, see Herbert Howe, "Private Security Forces and African Stability: The Case Executive Outcomes," Journal of Modern African Studies 36, no. 2 (Summer 1998): 307-31
132. Deborah Avant, The Market for Force: The Consequences of Privatizing Security (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2005)
133. Venter, War Dogs
134. Howe, "Private Security Forces and African Stability," 314.
135. International Crisis Group, "Sierra Leone: Time for a New Military and Political Strategy," Africa Report No. 28, (April 2001), 9.
136. International Crisis Group, "Sierra Leone: Managing Uncertainty," Africa Report No. 28 (April 2001), 11
137. Human Rights Watch, "Report on Child Soldiers," (1999). Accessed online at (http://www.hrw.org/reports/1999/guinea/ guine997-08.htm)
138. Human Rights Watch, "Sierra Leone: Getting Away with Murder, Mutilation, and Rape," vol. 11, no. 3a, (July 1999)
139. Human Rights Watch, "Sowing Terror: Atrocities Against Civilians in Sierra Leone," vol. 10, no. 3a, (July 1998).
140. Sierra Leone Truth and Reconciliation Commission, "Witness to the Truth," vol. 2, chap. 2, 38.
141. Ferme and Hoffman, "Hunter Militias and the International Human Rights Discourse in Sierra Leone and Beyond," 73, 80.
142. A unifying ideology that aligns principal and agent incentives could also coordinate effective M-form armed groups, as has been the case historically in some communist insurgencies. Numerous historical examples of effective M-form organization in conventional militaries also exist, such as Germany's emphasis on Auftragstaktik and Britain's emphasis on mission command. However, these cases differ from those examined in this article in key ways. For example, German and British subordinates to whom responsibility was delegated were better trained and indoctrinated to pursue organizational goals than are many contemporary insurgent subordinates. This would lead us to expect that delegation by leadership of armies in advanced countries would lead to outcomes more consistent with organizational goals than would delegation by insurgent leaders, many of whose subordinates receive little or no formal training and education.
143. Stephen John Stedman, "Spoiler Problems in Peace Processes," International Security 22, no. 2 (Fall 1997): 5-53
144. and Andrew Kydd and Barbara F. Walter, "Sabotaging the Peace: The Politics of Extremist Violence."
145. For a prisoner's dilemma-based explanation of peace settlements, see Barbara Walter, "The Critical Barrier to Civil War Settlement"; and Walter, Committing to Peace.